Slainte

Happy belated St. Paddy's Day! I didn't fulfill the drunken part of the stereotype, though my dad busted out his Bushmills 21 Year Old whiskey and we each had a taste of that. It's incredible stuff, to be sure. It comes in what's basically a silk-lined, wooden coffin, though, so calling it the water of life seems somehow contradictory. It's been laid back to rest in the liquor cabinet until the next big occasion -- my dad's birthday, maybe?

Naturally, we made a proper Irish dinner. My mom and I made corned beef, carrots, and potatoes in the slow cooker, cabbage in a pot with some of the corned beef juice (why don't they sell that in with the orange juice, I ask you), and Irish soda bread.

I had never made corned beef and she had never done it in a slow cooker, so we used sort of a combination of a few recipes, including the one at A Year of Slow Cooking. We used a bottle of Sam Adams Boston Lager plus a bit of water for the liquid. I liked the flavor it gave; my mom thought it was too strong and probably wouldn't do the beef in the slow cooker again. I was pleased with the results and will be eating leftovers soon.

My mom has a recipe she usually uses for Irish soda bread but Alena sent us the link to the one she tried this year, saying it was worth trying, so we went with that. Someone in the comments suggested "traditional" Irish soda bread doesn't have such niceties as sugar in it, which makes this kind of modern loaf more of an Irish soda cake, but admitted the Irish probably would have used sugar if they could have afforded it. So we'll forgive ourselves the breach with tradition.

It's a good thing my mom was supervising or else I definitely would have over-mixed and over-kneaded the dough. I need more practice with bread-making; the fact that it's possible to get overzealous and ruin the dough makes it more advanced than my usual fare. This stuff is pretty simple to whip up and you don't have to spread the process out over days to let it rise or anything, but the dough definitely ends up sticky and tricky to handle. Because of this, we ignored the suggestion of the recipe to form a ball and put it on a baking sheet; instead we put the dough in a shallow cake pan the way my mom normally does, so it automatically took that shape. We also drizzled some melted butter and sugar on top to make it extra crispalicious.

It came out great. I haven't had soda bread for years so I can't say how it compares, but I've eaten it every day since we made it: sometimes with butter, sometimes with honey, and today without anything because even like that it's tasty.

No cooking or leftovers today, though: it's my mom's birthday, so we're going out to Paciarino in Portland for a nice Italian dinner. Happy birthday, ma! Here's the card I made -- eat your heart out, Hallmark.

Fabian and Hojo will learn to get along eventually. For love.